If politics is show business for ugly people, then academic
publishing is too often literature for those with no talent for writing.
With lengthy acknowledgements, footnotes, quotations, illustrations,
shiny pages and a smart binding, it's quite possible to create the
semblance of a real book. The extent to which architects build up a
'brand' image and the way in which current media and business
practices encourage them are clearly worthwhile subjects at the moment.
It would, however, be surprising if there is much in Klingmann's
book which has not been said before, probably a great deal more clearly.
Some is written in the style of up-market American journalism and some
is little more than cooing over famous architects. Some reads like press
releases strung together. Some is incomprehensible. Some combines all
these and furthermore seems unaware of architectural history: 'the
idea of program is no longer limited to a fixed, pragmatic understanding
of function but now also signifies an architecture that is momentarily defined by social situations and must therefore also be open to future
modification'. So much for the Arts and Crafts movement of 100
years ago, then.

Some things just die when professionalising academic writers get
hold of them. Klingmann is actually 'the founder and principal of
an agency for architecture and brand building in New York', but she
has adopted all their methods. One of these is to quote someone who
simply states the obvious. You probably first heard about the difference
between the left and right sides of the brain from Tomorrow's
World, or possibly from Blue Peter, but it appears here in the form of a
statement from Marty Neumeier, 'a designer, writer, and former
publisher who operates at the forefront of collaborative brand
integration' (The Brand Gap, Indianapolis: New Riders, 2003, page
15). In fact much of Klingmann's book consists of critics'
opinions separated by a brief gloss. Some of the illustrational
photographs have been doctored, incomprehensibly, by someone called
Matthias Hollwich. Why? Is it art? What in fact is this book for? The
concluding sections are sharper and on their own might have made a
decent magazine article. And that's the best thing that can be said
about it.

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